Misotheism in Art and Literature
Misotheistic and/or dystheistic expression has a long history in the arts and in literature. Bernard Schweizer’s book Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism is devoted to this topic. He traces the history of ideas behind misotheism from the Book of Job, via Epicureanism and the twilight of Roman paganism, to deism, anarchism, Nietzschean philosophy, feminism, and radical humanism. The main literary figures in his study are Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Swinburne, Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca West, Elie Wiesel, Peter Shaffer, and Philip Pullman. Schweizer argues that literature is the preferred medium for the expression of God-hatred because the creative possibilities of literature allow writers to simultaneously unburden themselves of their misotheism, while ingeneously veiling their blasphemy.
Other examples include:
- Goethe's Prometheus
- the work of the Marquis de Sade
- John Milton's Paradise Lost is often cited as an apology of Satan's rebellion against a despotic God
- Emily Dickinson's poem "Apparently With No Surprise" depicts God as approving of suffering in the world, relating the tale of a flower "beheaded" by a late frost as the sun "measure off another day for an approving God".
- Mark Twain (himself a Deist) argued against what he saw as the petty God many followed in a posthumously published book, The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood. He talks, in part, about the African "sleeping sickness", malaria.
- Ivan Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1879 The Brothers Karamazov articulates what might be termed a dystheistic rejection of God. Koons covered this argument in the lecture immediately following the one referenced above. It was also discussed by Peter S. Fosl in his essay titled "The Moral Imperative to Rebel Against God".
- Konrad, the protagonist of Adam Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve, calls God a tsar.
In more recent times, the sentiment is present in a variety of media:
Read more about this topic: Misotheism
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or literature:
“I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.
I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell:
We’ll no more meet, no more see one another.
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter—
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)